I really love this amazing aerial photograph of the Lemp Brewery, a decade after International Shoe had taken over. You can see how the shoe company had already added several floors onto a couple of buildings and altered the smokestack of the third boiler house or power plant to say ISCO. The railyard is still active, and the first of only two new buildings the shoe company constructed, a water tower, has been built. What is also striking is the huge number of residential buildings surrounding the brewery to the south and east; the construction of the Ozark Expressway wiped away much of those houses, and also just simply made the area undesirable as the City committed the blocks east of South Broadway to industrial uses. Lemp Park, which would eventually be renamed Cherokee Park, is also intact, as is the front yard of the Chatillon-DeMenil House, where in a decade or so Lee Hess would begin his alterations for his Cherokee Cave attraction. A moment in time for sure, before so many changes in only twenty years.
Nice picture. It’s amazing how many trees are in Lyon park!
Now that’s some fine looking old photograph of the Lemp Brewery during it’s finished shoe products warehousing years 🙂 Inner South City was just too blue collar (No Beacon Hill, Massachusetts or Louisville’s Cherokee Triangle) within it’s early 20th century real estate geography to have brick constructed brownstones that are 300,000 bucks in their owned, present day property value averages beyond those everyday property and violent crime related shenanigans, Fleur-de-lis ornaments or no Fleur-de-Lis ornaments (similar to those now old fashion paper or plastic supermarket questions) 🙁
All wiped away in the name of progress!
This is a remarkable photograph!
My ancestors, Fred and Margaret Lang, lived in Block 1780 since the 1870s. That block is in the foreground, bounded by South Broadway and South Second, President and Potomac. This area has been seen referred to as Whistleburg in newspapers from 1874 and 1882.
This is a rare image from when residences and small businesses filled the block. Fred Lang was a veterinary surgeon here for over 30 years.
I’m pretty sure that the John Baitinger home is visible in this photograph. He was a brewer at Lemp. The home was at 3524 South Broadway. The front, hipped-roof part of the home was set back from South Broadway. At the time of this photo, it might have been only structure in Block 1780 that remained from the 1875 pictorial map.
(See Plate 9. of the St. Louis pictorial map which labels the home as J. Beutinger.)